The aliens have invaded, and they’ve already won. M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, a dystopian tale of a man’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world, has just claimed the Booker Prize, a first for a sci-fi novel.

The New York Times quotes a Booker Prize statement specifying that The End of Everything is “the first Booker winner to have emerged from the bona fide [science fiction] world,” though previous winners, including Margaret Atwood (who won for 2019’s The Testaments) and Kazuo Ishiguro (who won for 1989’s The Remains of the Day, which isn’t one of his genre-influenced works), have “borrowed facets” of the genre.

“Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artifacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been mislaid. It feels like the end.

Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artifact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding, from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.”

At 81, Harrison is also the oldest-ever Booker Prize winner, capping off a six-decade literary career; his previous works include sci-fi noir Nova Swing , which won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K.

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